5 Things You Should Know Before the Stock Market Opens

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- U.S. stock futures indicated Wall Street would open lower Thursday as data showed China's factory activity shrank to a four-month low and Germany's business activity showed only slight expansion.

European shares were lower and Asian stocks finished the trading session mixed. Japan's Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo ended 0.4% higher at 10,127.08.

Thursday's economic calendar in the U.S. features the usual weekly initial and continuing jobless claims at 8:30 a.m. EDT. The consensus, according to Briefing.com, is for initial claims to tick up to 355,000 from 351,000 last week..

Goldman Sachs(GS) has begun scanning internal emails for the term "muppet" and other evidence that employees referred to clients in derogatory ways, CEO Lloyd Blankfein told partners in a conference call this week, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the call.

Greg Smith, a former banker at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times last week that he saw Goldman managing directors often refer to clients in internal emails as muppets, which is slang for a stupid person in Britain.